Bleacher Report Hits a Home Run with Microservices and New Relic

Bleacher Report, a subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting System, a Time Warner Company, is the leading digital destination for team-specific sports content and real-time event coverage. One of the fastest-growing digital properties in the U.S., Bleacher Report’s growing roster of lead writers and premier contributors create hundreds of pieces of content per day to provide fans with the most comprehensive experience for their favorite teams and topics across all major sports

Moving from monolithic application to microservices

Are you a basketball fan? How about baseball, football, or hockey? Chances are you’ve heard of Bleacher Report, which offers the news and content sports fans crave. Founded in 2007, Bleacher Report gets more than 60 million unique visitors each month and is the second-largest sports website in the world. “We want to be the go-to destination for every sports fan,” says Eddie Dombrowski, senior software engineer for Bleacher Report. “That means having the best website, the best app, and the best presence on social media.”

Being a top destination on the Internet requires consistent performance and a high degree of scalability that can deliver a good user experience even during high-volume periods such as major sporting events or breaking sports news. “People want news fast,” says Tung Nguyen, vice president of engineering at Bleacher Report. “They won’t come back to your site if you don’t deliver the experience they expect.”

To improve performance, Bleacher Report embarked on a multi-year journey to turn its monolithic web application into a microservices-based architecture. “We started with one service and now we have about 20,” says Nguyen. Adds Dombrowski: “By breaking our monolithic application into smaller apps, we can isolate functionality and use the best technology for each problem. Moving to microservices gives us a more stable and faster application.”

“When things go wrong, New Relic helps us pinpoint exactly where the issue is. Instead of asking the user a dozen or more questions about the problem, you only need to ask one question. And it's the right question because we use New Relic.”

Eddie Dombrowski
Senior Software Engineer

Staying on top of the performance game

Bleacher Report has been a New Relic customer since 2009. “Our journey with New Relic started about seven years ago at 3:00 a.m. as I was trying to debug our site which had been crashing repeatedly,” says Nguyen. “New Relic gave me exactly what I needed: immediate and specific insight into the performance problems with our code.”

Today Bleacher Report relies on New Relic® Software Analytics—including New Relic APM™ and the platform capabilities of New Relic Plugins™, and New Relic Servers™—for performance monitoring, proactive load testing, and capacity planning. For example, New Relic Alerts™ send notifications to Bleacher Report’s chat platform to help the DevOps teams manage their workflow and collaborate on resolving performance issues. “I use New Relic every day,” says Dombrowski. “It helps me find ways to make our application perform better and prioritize which areas to address.”

Over the years, Nguyen’s team has found multiple use cases for the performance and usage insight that New Relic provides. “While we initially deployed New Relic for reactive monitoring of production performance, it’s also allowed us to become more proactive in our approach,” says Nguyen. “For instance, we use insight from New Relic to plan and develop new services based on having a better understanding of traffic patterns and top transactions.”

Part of being proactive includes being prepared for the huge spikes in traffic during major sporting events. “During the Super Bowl, especially if there’s something unexpected like a blackout in the stadium, we know that we can experience four times as much traffic as our normal baseline,” says Nguyen. “But we’re ready for that because we’ve already measured, tested, and benchmarked our application in anticipation. New Relic is an essential part of our strategy for planning for these high-volume events.”

“With more and more microservices talking to each other, we’re going to have to be even more diligent about how we measure and track performance. New Relic will help us do that by alerting developers and owners of services to potential issues.”

Tung Nguyen
VP of Engineering

Winning the race to be the best sports website

With insight from New Relic, Bleacher Report is saving time and money as well as providing a better user experience. “New Relic helps identify why code is slow so that we can improve it,” say Nguyen. “By making our code more efficient, we need fewer servers to run it, which saves us money.” Not only does New Relic help Bleacher Report save money on running its application, but it also helps reduce expensive downtime. “If our site is down, it costs us tens of thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue,” says Nguyen.

Dombrowski cites how New Relic helps Bleacher Report respond more quickly and effectively to issues reported by users: “When things go wrong, New Relic helps us pinpoint exactly where the issue is,” says Dombrowski. “Instead of asking the user a dozen or more questions about the problem, you only need to ask one question. And it's the right question because we use New Relic.”

As Bleacher Report continues its microservices journey, Nguyen sees New Relic as being more critical than ever. “With more and more microservices talking to each other, we’re going to have to be even more diligent about how we measure and track performance,” says Nguyen. “New Relic will help us do that by alerting developers and owners of services to potential issues.”

When asked where he sees Bleacher Report in five years, Dombrowski predicts the company will no longer be the second biggest sports website—it will have nabbed the top spot. “At that point, when people think about sports, they will think of Bleacher Report," says Dombrowski. With New Relic as a trusted partner on the journey, the odds are good that Bleacher Report will win over many more sports fans to achieve that goal.